Confronting COVID-19

In the middle of her first year at Harris, as people began to understand the devastating impact the virus would have, Soskin and her friends felt a need to do something.

The unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic forced the pivot from in-person to online learning with remarkable speed. Practically overnight, Harris Public Policy students and professors were logging into Zoom from homes all over the world.

After the Keller Center emptied out following the conclusion of Winter Quarter, Spring Quarter began at home. Throughout an unprecedented transition to virtual learning necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic, a sense of community remained.

Harris students and alumni “are energized by a problem,” Marie Trzupek Lynch said in comments echoed by the other panelists. “We want to dig our teeth into it and solve it. Problems for us are opportunities.”

A neighborhood in the top 10th percentile for uninsured residents has a test positivity rate that is 78 percent higher than the regional average, but a testing rate that is only 52 percent higher.

Nuro, in a span of about two weeks, transformed its road-legal grocery-toting bot “R2” into a contactless transport vehicle for food and medical supplies at the coronavirus treatment facility that California created at Sacramento’s Sleep Train Arena.